I'm V. Harlow — a writer working mostly in short fiction and the personal essay. I've been publishing here since early 2023, though I've been keeping notebooks since I was twelve and have nothing useful to show for most of them.
I grew up on the Atlantic coast, left for a decade of various cities and various mistakes, and came back. The sea has a way of doing that. Most of what I write is quietly shaped by it — the way light behaves over open water, the particular silence of a harbour at 4 a.m., the feeling that something important is always just out of frame.
My fiction tends toward the quiet and the strange. I'm interested in characters who notice too much or too little, in moments when ordinary life tilts slightly sideways. A few of my stories have appeared in small literary journals; the ones I'm most proud of are the ones that took the longest to finish.
The essays here are mostly about reading and writing — process, influence, the books that have mattered. I try to write them the way I'd talk to a good reader over coffee: honest about what I don't know, careful with what I do.
Why "Coastvex"?
A vex is an archaic term for a small tidal inlet — a place where the sea presses inland, where the water doesn't quite know what it wants to be. I found the word in a 19th-century hydrographer's survey and wrote it in the margin of a notebook. It seemed right for a site that sits between forms: fiction and essay, note and finished piece, coast and whatever is inland from it.
Contact
The best way to reach me is by email: hello [at] coastvex.icu. I read everything, though I'm slow to reply during long drafts.
I'm not on social media in any meaningful way. If you want to follow new work, the RSS feed is the most reliable method.